We get users who come in every once in a while who try to upload files with foreign languages with non-English character sets such as Hebrew or Russian. Sometimes these characters display fine and sometimes they appear as gibberish.

The root of this problem is due to different types of character encoding standards. Character encoding in short is how the computer knows what character to display. The most prominent character encoding standard on the web is UTF-8, which is what Routific also uses. The problem comes when a file saved with a different character encoding is uploaded to Routific.

Different applications and even different versions of the same application will naturally save files with different character encoding standards. For example, earlier versions of Excel will save a file using a different character encoding standard called ASCII, whereas newer versions of Excel default to UTF-8.

If you're seeing characters displaying incorrectly in Routific, we recommend converting your file to UTF-8 encoding. AgileBits has written a nice guide on how to save a file with UTF-8 encoding using different applications.